Wednesday, October 30, 2013

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A
below is with Michelle
Willmers, Project Manager of the OpenUCT Initiative at the
University of Cape Town (UCT) in
South Africa.

Michelle Willmers

A former journal
publishing manager, Michelle Willmers was drawn to the Open Access movement after
witnessing international publishers sweep into South Africa and acquire local
journals. They then locked these journals behind paywalls and sought to sell
them to local academic institutions at prices most simply could not afford.

For the South
African academic community this was a case of bad to worse: Historically South
African research has not been published over much in international journals. As
such, it has tended to be invisible to the global research community. Now it
was in danger of becoming invisible to local researchers as well.

Explaining her
journey to OA Willmers says, “It was perhaps less of a case of becoming an OA
advocate than having a deep realisation that the local scholarly communication
paradigm was broken. The conversation around how to first acknowledge and then
address this led in the open access direction.”

It was this same broken
local context that led to the creation (in 1997) of the South Africa-based
service African Journals Online (AJOL) — which Dominique Babini referred to in an earlier Q&A in this series. A local web portal that
enables African journals to make their content available online (and so visible
on a global basis without the need to cede ownership to international
publishers), AJOL currently hosts content from 462 African journals, 150 of which
are OA.

And it is this local
context that saw the recent launch of SciELO-SA, a South African version of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), the online open-access publishing
platform pioneered in Brazil. SciELO-SA was launched with the
content of 26 “free to access and free to publish” South African journals, and
it is expected that the service will eventually include around 180 of the
country’s 300 journals.

Monday, October 21, 2013

To what extent should we expect
publishers who profess a commitment to Open Access (OA) to be open in other ways too? This is a question
often raised in discussions about OA. Some, for instance, argue (e.g. here
and here)
that OA ought to go hand-in-hand with open peer review (particularly in light
of the recent “sting” of OA journals by Science). Others have argued
that OA publishers have a duty to be more open in the management of their
business. And it has been suggested that OA publishers should be more transparent about their finances. But what about when publishers make use of
social media like blogs? How transparent should they be about who is behind the
site, and what their objective is? This thought occurred to me recently when I
was trying to find out who runs the Open Science blog.

Like
companies everywhere, scholarly publishers have in recent years taken an
increasing interest in the social web. Most, if not all, now have their own
Twitter accounts, some have Google+ accounts, and most now run their own blogs
(see for instance those run by PLOS, BioMed Central, Wiley and Elsevier).

In
doing so, they invariably view the new platforms as useful new marketing tools
for promoting their products and services — or in some cases as a space where
their authors can promote their own books or journals (see, for instance, the
blog run by Springer). Given these
objectives, it is apparent to anyone reading or subscribing to these blogs
exactly who runs them, what their purpose is, and the nature of the
relationship they are asking readers to enter into with the site. If nothing
else, the URL will invariably flag ownership.

But
what if a publisher were to run a blog without indicating that it owned and/or
controlled it? Suppose, for instance, that the intention was simply to provide
a platform for discussing and reporting on a particular topic (e.g. Open
Access). In such circumstances, could anonymity (or at least some degree of
non-transparency) engender more productive discussions? In other words, might
it be possible to provide a more effective communication platform if ownership of
the site was cloaked in some way? Or would the interests of the site owner make
it impossible to provide an independent platform?

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA),
the Q&A below is with Philippe
Terheggen, Managing Director, STM Journals. Terheggen, who is responsible for all 2,500 of Elsevier’s journals, is
the second representative of a traditional commercial publisher to take part in
this series.

Philippe Terheggen

As
the largest legacy journal publisher, Elsevier tends to attract more criticism from
the OA movement than other publishers. One could argue, however, that it has conspired
in this by doing more than other publishers to try to derail OA — not least by aggressively
supporting the infamous Research Works Act (RWA) in 2011.

Today,
however, Elsevier accepts that OA has become mainstream, that it needs to
embrace it, and that it may not turn out to be the monster that the publisher assumed it to
be. As Philippe Terheggen says below, “In
my opinion, we’re past the notion of OA as a threat to publishers as there are many
examples of OA publishers who run a perfectly healthy business.”

Please
scroll through if you wish to go direct to the Q&A

At the end
of the Q&A is a timeline

But
where is Elsevier with OA right now? Currently, it publishes some 2,500 journals,
all of which are available on its electronic platform ScienceDirect, which now hosts nearly
12 million articles. The vast majority of these journals, however, are still
subscription-based, and Elsevier currently publishes just 56 pure Gold OA journals. It
does however offer a Hybrid OA
option for 1,600 of its subscription journals.

How
quickly is Elsevier moving to embrace OA? At the beginning of 2013 the
publisher had 31 OA titles. This year 25 new ones will be added, and the
expectation is that a further 25 OA journals will be launched in 2014.

Sunday, October 06, 2013

Sami Kassab is an Executive Director at the
investment company Exane BNP Paribas, where he runs
the Media Research team covering professional publishing. Amongst the companies Kassab
monitors are Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Informa, John Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, and Pearson. Currently, Kassab is positive about
the sector, arguing that scientific publishing offers “best in class defensive
growth in a very resilient industry”. Kassab believes that Open Access (OA) is still a marginal activity and in any case poses neither
a short-term nor a long-term threat to large scholarly publishers. In fact, he
says, it will enable them to monetise more articles than they have been able to monetise historically.

Kassab’s views
will undoubtedly challenge OA advocates, who have long maintained that Open Access
will mean that publishers will play a much smaller role in disseminating research in
the future. This, they add, will force them to downsize, and so reduce the financial burden on the research community. Indeed, it was in the
expectation that OA will lower the costs of scholarly communication that many
people joined the OA movement in the first place — especially librarians, who
have long sought relief from the so-called serials
crisis (Whereby the
cost of serials has consistently outstripped libraries’ ability to pay for all
the journals they need).

Concomitantly,
OA advocates argued that Open Access will inevitably reduce the profits of
scholarly publishers, a belief that gained credence from the way in which publishers have persistently lobbied against OA over the past decade or so.

Until a few
years ago Sami Kassab and his colleagues at BNP Paribas viewed OA as a
threat to publishers too. In 2003, for instance, the website newratings.comreported
that BNP Paribas had downgraded Reed Elsevier to “underperform” — on the
grounds that the investment firm had concerns “regarding the company's current
subscription based access, as compared to the newer and more successful
article-fee based open access system.”

But this is no
longer the view of Exane BNP Paribas, or of Kassab. Today the investment company is upbeat
about the future of large scholarly publishers like Elsevier.